GNN-Based Persistent K-core Community Search in Temporal Graphs

The goal of community search is to provide effective solutions for real-time, high-quality community searches within large networks. In many practical applications, such as event organization and friend recommendations, discovering various community structures within a network is crucial for users. However, existing community search algorithms rarely address issues within temporal graphs, and those that do often have two main limitations: (1) traditional community search methods become inefficient and experience significant increases in computation time when scaled to large graphs; (2) while GNN-based community search methods for temporal graphs offer generalizability, they often focus solely on community connectivity and lack cohesiveness. Therefore, we propose a new model PK-GCN, based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), to identify persistent k-core communities in temporal networks. This model can handle dynamic changes in temporal graphs and identify communities that persist over time. Compared to existing community search methods, our model not only finds communities with tighter structures but also allows for dynamic queries based on user input without needing retraining. Specifically, our model constructs features by integrating k-core information from core decomposition, graph features, and query features, resulting in more expressive node representations. Additionally, we designed a flexible dynamic query mechanism that allows users to input time information to query communities. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms other GNN-based community search algorithms in F1-score.